Consumer-ified machine translation apps -- on your computer, on your phone, on your Smart Watch -- have made impressive strides in aiding the awkward traveling tourist abroad, and the past year's headlines have been dominated by Google Translate and Microsoft's Skype simultaneous translation.
But more intriguing to us as human interpreters are human-translator-powered commerce platforms -- an Uber for language translation needs.. Setlr is a marketplace (in beta) whose mission is to put translators directly in touch with clients. Babelverse will use mobile tech to get at-point-of-need translation done real time by live humans.
Both should be interesting to watch as they go live and scale up network effects.